The average number of meanings per word in German

Based on a study of the evolving number of words in the successive editions of our German-English Literary Dictionary, we can safely venture to say that, for German :

– there are about 2 meanings per word on average for the 10,000 or so most commonly-used words (such as those listed in the initial version of our dictionary) ;

– there are 1.6 meanings per word when the word-population is expanded to 30,000 or so widely-used terms, such as those in the latest version of the dictionary ;

– there are fewer meanings per word on average for the other words.

These figures have been gleaned from the evolving contents of this dictionary, which initially contained some 12,000 of the most frequently-used German words, and which has regularly been expanded to incorporate more of the words used in the (German-language) definitions and examples of the previous versions, as follows :

1. Meanings per word :

2. Meanings per word in the increments :

3. Conclusion :

Instead of just telling their pupils just that “most German words have several different meanings”, teachers of German everywhere could perhaps now add something like ”there are about 1.6 meanings per word on average, a value which tends to decrease when more and more words are taken into account..."

We haven’t been able to do a similar study on the English vocabulary, but since English belongs to the Germanic family of languages and shares the basic linguistic characteristics of its Germanic forebear, the Anglo-Saxon language (also known as “Old English”) spoken by the Angles, Saxons and Frisians who settled in Britain in the 5th Century A.D., we tend to think that the above figures might be roughly applicable to English (and to the other members of the Germanic family of languages – Dutch, Swedish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Frisian, Low German, etc.) too.